Events

Lectures

How Numbers Lie: Intersectional Violence and the Quantification of Race

Photo courtesy of Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Tracing the genealogy of statistical discourses on race, Khalil Gibran Muhammad explores the violence of racial quantification on black women and men’s lives beginning in the postbellum period. How did the numbers of out of wedlock childbirths or incarcerated men come to define the progress and potential of African Americans by contrast to others? Why have such facts spoken for themselves as is so often said today? Or have they?

Muhammad is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. In July, he will join the Harvard faculty as Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

This lecture is being presented by the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute.

"How Criminals Are Made" captures the environmental critique of crime made by Progressive era social reformers as they focused on helping struggling white and immigrant inner-city families. From the 1907 Annual Report of the Central Howard Association, courtesy of the Newberry Library

“Radcliffe Professors strengthen Harvard because they enhance the excellence and diversity of the faculty,” said Dean Lizabeth Cohen. “We are thrilled that the Institute helped bring Professor Muhammad—a leading scholar on matters of race, social justice, and opportunity, and a fellow historian—to Cambridge.”

Muhammad advocates that higher-education and local institutions ought to connect more, which will sustain public engagement by providing “the kind of civic literacy we need in order to have a healthier democracy."

During the Great Depression, a corner of 170th Street in New York City was known as the Bronx Slave Market, where household workers and other laborers would go each morning seeking day work. Make a Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York), 1938. Photo by Robert McNeill, Smithsomian American Art Museum

Domestic workers—many poor and working-class women of color—relied on history and storytelling to mobilize a movement to reform household labor.

Pathbreaking theoretical computer scientist Cynthia Dwork, who has made formative contributions in the fields of privacy, cryptography, and distributed computing, will join the faculty of Harvard University and hold a Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship.

Today’s civil institutions reflect the legacy of the Black Power movement, says Joyce M. Bell in her lecture, “Race and Resistance: The Lasting Legacy of the Black Power Movement” at the Radcliffe Institute.

“Slavery was not just a system of holding people in bondage, it was holding people in bondage for a purpose, and that was to make money, to make money off of their bodies, and that’s the important realization that Americans have to come to,” said Professor Annette Gordon-Reed at a recent Harvard panel discussion.

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